Sir Alex Ferguson retirement causes Twitter explosion

Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement has been officially confirmed, with a Tweet by Manchester United making the announcement causing Twitter to explode with activity.

Highlighting the impact Twitter has had on breaking news events, the social media giant has confirmed that a Tweet sent from the official Manchester United Twitter feed, confirming Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement has sparked more than 100,000 mentions in less than an hour.

According to early figures released by the Facebook rival, this single Tweet sparked more than 1.4 million mentions and a staggering 18,000 retweets and favourites in less than an hour after the original posting.

Speaking via an official blog posting, Twitter has announced the impressive figures, stating: “The story dominated Twitter's trends, taking eight of the 10 UK trending topic spots, and four of the 10 worldwide trends. #ThankYouSirAlex was Twitter’s number one global trend within eight minutes of the club’s first tweet.”

The social behemoth added: “Breaking news on Twitter is an established way to grow your account, and a hashtag is a way to group together a global conversation. That hashtag gave United’s fans a way to come together and discuss the news.

“Sport, and football in particular, is one of Twitter’s most-talked about subjects. Seven out of 10 of the most talked-about moments of 2012 on Twitter were sport-related, and today’s story was no different.”

Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, who has led the club for 26 years, claiming a record breaking 38 trophies in the process, confirmed earlier today that we will step down from his longstanding position at the end of the current season. It is not yet known who will replace him as the Manchester United manager.